The present invention relates to systems and protocols supporting communication of electronic commerce documents among participants in a community and among participants in communities that are joined in a network of communities. More particularly, it relates to systems and protocols for routing electronic commerce documents among participants and for securing transmission along routes.
Business-to-business (B2B) and application-to-application (A2A) electronic commerce are replacing former protocols for electronic data interchange (EDI). As businesses strive to improve their efficiency with B2B and A2A systems, a number of incompatible platforms and competing standards have emerged. Among compatible standards, gaps remain to be filled. For instance, the industry has defined what a simple web service is. Standards related to simple Web service include UDDI, WSDL, XSDL and SOAP. However, these standards do not fully mean the security, reliability, manageability, and choreography requirements for practical B2B and A2A electronic commerce. Conversations and collaborative web services composition based on process flow are ingredients of collaborative and complex web services, which are not the subject of any comprehensive or unified standard.
There are a number of industry initiatives to extend standards applicable to B2B and A2A electronic commerce. Choreography efforts include ebXML/BPSS from OASIS, WSFL from IBM, and XLANG from Microsoft. Conversation efforts include ebXML/TRP from OASIS and Microsoft's WS-routing. The dominant security effort is WS-security from IBM and Microsoft, there is also a complementary security effort in OASIS called SAML. For reliability, there are proposals from Microsoft, ebXML/TRP from OASIS, and HTTPR from IBM. W3C is addressing standardization in all of these areas. Key industry players have formed a rival consortium called WSI. There are no real standards for process flow, although there are many proprietary implementations of process flow. For manageability, it may be useful to define centrally information that empowers interoperability of web services, by specifying policies and capabilities of entities involved in electronic commerce. One industry standard for central definitions is ebXML CPP/CPA contract definitions, which is promulgated by OASIS.
Accordingly, an opportunity arises to devise methods and structures that embrace, unify and fill the gaps among many relevant Web service standards, including SOAP, UDDI, ebXML, WSDL, WS-security, SAML, and XSDL. Overall, end to end services and capability for secure delivery of electronic commerce documents between entities desiring to do business is useful.